As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it–the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction–with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it). It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out–okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret–every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them–or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing–we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule–for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading–was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

Great post. I stumbled across your students’ blog several days ago and was really impressed with it — some of the textual connections they made and the interpretations they came up with equal just about anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

Second, thanks for helping me shake the intentional fallacy. Since all of my DFW reading has come post-mortem I’ve found it very difficult to separate what I know about the author from what I see on the page. I’m going to redouble my efforts now.

[…] Wallace’s at Pomona, taught a single-author course on Wallace this past semester, and she has some interesting musings on the subject. Worth a read. (Particular of note, at least as far as I’m concerned: the blog […]

“The act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.”

Thank you for sharing this – it was very poignant and I think it will help a lot of people get more out of the book.

I don’t disagree with you, at all. One of the things that came up in our class discussion of E&M, though, was the difficulty of figuring out exactly who its audience was meant to be. The math is a bit oversimplified (and in places flat incorrect, according to a mathematician friend of mine) for the book to be aimed at those already in the know, math-wise, but it’s still a good bit overwhelming for those more than a couple of years away from their college calculus. The Venn diagram of its audience — Wallace fans and/or fans of literary nonfiction who are unafraid of math and yet not knowledgeable enough to be annoyed by the elisions — produces a pretty small overlap. The further out of that overlap one falls, the more difficult the book becomes…

Oddly enough, Everything and More was the first Wallace book I read. I enjoy or suffer from (take your pick) being a wannabe mathematical dilettante, reading about the meanings and implications of math without actually developing a working knowledge of anything nontrivial. After Infinite Summer, I’ll have to pull it from the library again and see what my enhanced appreciation for the author brings to the text.

Ditto. E&M was my introduction to Wallace as well. As everywhere, it was his Voice which brought me in. Here was a man who obviously had fun with his subject, and could make a 300 page overview of the history of Math an enjoyable adventure.
mm

Those knowledgeable enough to know where he gets it wrong are also generally smart enough to understand the difference between the Absolute Truth and the Right Story. Wallace generally tells the right story, even if he has to bend the “truth” a bit in E&M.

From the other side now: give mathematicians a little credit for being more literate than language mavens are numerate.

I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out.

This is something that has been bugging my about IJ as I go through it: the stakes just seem way too low.

In the other encyclopedic, door-stop books mentioned above, the stakes are much higher: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW and CRYPTONOMICON dealt with WWII and its aftermath; UNDERWORLD dealt with the Cold War, the Kennedy Assassination, etc. In our reading for IJ this week, we spent dozens of pages reading in incredible about a high-school tennis tournament in Long Island. We read about the dull color of used tennis balls, the sound mad when a player hits a tarp in an indoor tennis court, about the different types of tennis clothing the students wear. All of this just seems so much smaller and less significant. The stakes just seem so low in IJ: it’s largely about kids at a tennis academy and their lives. (And I would again register her, in passing, my observation that nothing in the tennis sequence had anything to do with the near-future setting of the book; it’s as if the tennis sequences like this relatively conventional (if hyper-detailed) take on a high-school tennis tournament existed in an entirely different book from the other parts of the book. But I can imagine the responses: Why the need to have things come together? Why do you impose an artificial need for things to cohere?)

The post above also makes some interesting points about separating text and author. That’s fine, and I generally don’t care about the bio of an author (perhaps Pynchon did his readers a favor by remaining so hidden; DFW was, in contrast, a full-blown celebrity), but I can’t help but keep getting dragged back to this sense that in IJ, DFW is writing about some things he knows very well (the prime example: junior-level tennis) and some things that he doesn’t know that well (e.g., technology, the future, etc.), and it shows, and the two things just do not fit together.

IJ indulges in an absurd level of minute detail as to events on the tennis court, at a hyper-realistic level (the sounds of sneakers on “eraser-like” courts, nerves before a game, etc.), but then resorts to more cartoonish and dated (even in 1996) visions of a cartridge future of lonely isolated entertainment. (Another note in passing: the web was around and becoming a big deal in 1994, 95, and 96 — how did DFW/IJ get what the web would become so wrong? Nothing in IJ suggests that the “Interlace” system could become something like what we are using right here: a means and space for people from disparate places to find each other, communicate and share interests, share pictures, music, ideas, challenge repressive governments, etc. If nothing else, this very site and wonderful project we’re all engaged in show just how off IJ’s vision of the future really was.)

I really appreciate the concerns that OG raises here, though I think ultimately I come down differently on how to resolve the concerns. Isn’t the “stake” of Infinite Jest how to write a novel of ideas after Pynchon, Delillo, etc.? If so-called post-modern writing places its characters in a universe of floating signifiers, and ties them to a an ironic fate that evades agency, then isn’t to continue the project of the novel itself to see whether and how subjectivity might recover in this same milieu? It’s all well and good to write novels that assume subjectivity and experience (and they fill shelves, and are not without talented and revealing writers), but it is another and more difficult task to organize it. In one of my earlier posts on my site, I indicated a need to look further into the role of speculative fiction and “meta-fiction” in IJ; then I noticed that, against the categories of realism and meta-fiction DFW says something on the order of trying to “meta-the-difference” between them. There’s much to work out here, surely, but it suggests that IJ’s “detail” is not just for the sake of detail, but for the sake of a project.

“This is something that has been bugging my about IJ as I go through it: the stakes just seem way too low.”

This comment, along with your assessment that Underworld, GR and Cryptonomicon are somehow more important or have higher stakes, makes me think you’re probably a fair bit older than me. I’m actually re-reading Underworld now and thoroughly enjoying it, but as a person who was born in the early 80s, the post 2nd WW and Cold War themes seem more distant than the inward turning individual in late capitalist, hyperconsumerist society struggling with abuse and lack of real/meaningful communication in a media-saturated world (to name only a few themes from IJ).

So maybe the stakes seem low to you, but I don’t think there is a consensus on that. For us ‘kids’ who did the bulk of our growing up after the fall of the Berlin wall, IJ seems more relevant, somehow. But I might be wrong and I’m very curious in other people’s assessments. Could it be a generational thing?

And if you really think IJ is mostly about kids on a tennis academy or predictions about some kind of future technology, well….I don’t know what to say.

Dutchguy: So maybe the stakes seem low to you, but I don’t think there is a consensus on that. And I don’t think I posited that there is a consensus. I’m just posting my own responses to the book.

That’s an interesting point about age. I was born in the mid 70’s. But Wallace was even older than me, so I don’t know what to make of that.

As to IJ’s themes, this is quickly becoming my favorite topics. A response I often get is that IJ is “encylopedic” that it’s about “everything” or it’s “deeply philosophical” or about “entertainment”, etc. I usually want to say, really? Because it’s my take — unless someone wants to disagree (and I’m sure someone will) — that the most fully fleshed out characters in the book are the ETA students. The other characters are sometimes interesting, but they come and go and (to me) make no real impact. DFW lavishes his most loving care in establishing Hal, Orin, and the other ETA characters: not so much with other characters. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think the novel is largely about these kids at a tennis academy (and, yes, their lives and families, etc.) And there’s nothing wrong with that either.

One question I would have for you, Dutchguy: what does a scene like the extended description of the Port Washington tennis tournament have to do with the themes you say IJ is about (i.e., “the inward turning individual in late capitalist, hyperconsumerist society struggling with abuse and lack of real/meaningful communication in a media-saturated world” [inter alia])? What does it have to do with the near future? What does it have to do with anything but these ETA kids playing tennis and their various styles of play, dress, racket choice, etc? My answer would be not much.

I know that the professional tennis circuit is referred to as “The Show” in the book, but that seems (to me) like a stretch to try to wedge DFW’s intense knowledge and descriptions of junior tennis into a larger theme of “Entertainment”.

The above reflects solely the opinions of me, and in no way purport to reflect a consensus opinion.

The other characters are sometimes interesting, but they come and go and (to me) make no real impact. DFW lavishes his most loving care in establishing Hal, Orin, and the other ETA characters

I couldn’t disagree with this more, actually. Except for Hal, I can’t keep all these damn tennis boys straight. (And Orin is not at ETA during anything I’ve read, so I don’t think it’s fair tossing him in there.) Pemulis? Schacht? Troeltsch? One of them is the dealer guy, and one of them is washed up because of the knee, and one of them is… I don’t even know what. But I don’t know who’s who.

The stuff that really sticks with me (besides Hal and the amazing Hal & Orin phone calls) is some of the other characters.

For example, the exchange with Kate Gompert and the doctor.
“You really must have wanted to hurt yourself, then, it seems.”
(skip)
“It’s bullshit. I didn’t have any special grudges. I didn’t fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves”…
“I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore is all.”

I don’t think Kate’s been back, but I can’t stop thinking about this passage.

There’s one with Poor Tony that just hit me in the gut as I read it last night, but I’m a fair bit ahead of the spoiler mark so I won’t post it.

I know what you mean about the Kate Gompert introduction. That is one of the most chilling and oddly beautiful articulations of “longing for pain to cease,” I’ve ever encountered. It’s one of my favorite things about DFW, the way he can take a very specific human experience and just bring the lights up really slowly on the nuance, and he can do it with comedy and tragedy. Hey did you mean Roy Tony? There’s a scene that made me laugh so hard I dropped the book. Now when people come over I make them read it out loud just so I can hear it again in different voices. Makes me laugh every time.

“what does a scene like the extended description of the Port Washington tennis tournament have to do with the themes you say IJ is about (i.e., “the inward turning individual in late capitalist, hyperconsumerist society struggling with abuse and lack of real/meaningful communication in a media-saturated world” [inter alia])? What does it have to do with the near future? What does it have to do with anything but these ETA kids playing tennis and their various styles of play, dress, racket choice, etc? My answer would be not much.”

OG, I have to go from memory here, since I’m not actually (re)reading IJ at the moment, so I’m not sure to what extent the following is actually contained in the segment you use as an example, but -spoiler alert here, kind of- the tennis academy components in general are a lot about how the competition amongst the kids and the way they are trained dehumanizes them somehow. All are acutely aware of their relative positions, ranking and seeding, and what that means in terms of chances of getting to The Show (the term itself is also elaborated upon later-as you also indicate yourself), but at the same time they have to eliminate all emotions to compete optimally. So I guess a big theme here is the growing up and dealing with the pressures in a highly meritocratic, individualistic sport (drug use is obviously one way of dealing with the pressure). But the high amount of detail, for me, simply works to flesh out the characters and make them ‘real’ for me as a reader. At the same time it gives a glimpse into how sponsorship also influences life here. There’s probably more to say here, but I don’t wanna spoil too much or be too vague. Maybe others can elaborate…

One of the blog posts a day or two ago included a quote from DFW where he explained (I’m paraphrasing) that one of the points he was trying to address in the book was how a loss of purpose or organizing principles leaves with a sort of gaping spiritual hole and nothing to give ourselves away to. I’m only on page 366 so my ideas are still coming together, but the AA scenes and the Marathe/Steeply conversations have kind of started to crystallize some things. It’s hard to state in a few words (which is I think why this is a 1000+ page novel and not a short story) and without using spoiler-examples, but it seems like one of the central questions the novel raises is how we can reconcile “the utter autonomy of the individual” and the plain old simple fact that when so many of us exercise this autonomy without some organizing principle (or with an organizing principle of, say, trying to recapture the euphoria and contentment you felt the first time you freebased) we end up meeting some pretty bad ends.

Most of the kids we follow at ETA are 17 and in the next year or so will figure out whether they’re going to go to The Show, go off to play college tennis, take the prorector route, or do something else entirely. That’s a lot of pressure. Some of the kids who don’t make it to The Show are going to be dealing with this lack of purpose stuff pretty soon – Hal, for example, who at the point of the Port Washington match it looks like he’s set to go on to The Show, but who is negotiating for a college scholarship at the beginning of the novel. I think Dutchguy is right, what I took away from the Port Washington scene is just how brutal this competition is and how aware these kids all are of their worth in relation to each other. There are so many different paths these kids could take, and it will be interesting to see what they decide and how they come to those decisions – especially in contrast to the residents at Ennet House, who we’ll be seeing a lot more of.

I’m excited for when more readers have finished the book and we can all talk about it with a better idea of how it actually fits together – trying to talk intelligently about it when we’re only 300/1000 pgs in feels like flying blind.

I think you’re onto something here. It will be interesting to see what kind of critical response to the book emerges as younger generations are exposed to it. I was born in 83 and I think IJ is incredibly compelling. I can appreciate the other “Big Novels” but I haven’t read any other work – big or small – that feels as relevant to my experiences as IJ does.

I’d like to make an obvious rebuttal to my post above: why should “stakes” matter? What were the stakes in ULYSSES or FINNEGANS WAKE? A massive book does not have to be about or set in a massive historical event. Each character can be a self-contained universe, etc. Also, OG, you are an idiot.

Sometimes the Kraken lolls about the sea-bed, battening on sea worms; and at other times, the Kraken rises to the surface and shrieks and overwhelms ships and frightens seaboard communities. And sometimes, even in the moment of shrieking, the Kraken regrets having shrieked at the community and recognizes that there were other things, matters, etc. to consider.

And here the Kraken shows a surprising humility and basic fair-mindedness, and calls a spade a spade.

I’m actually reading “Ulysses” for the first time this summer, while also following along with Infinite Summer (though I’m not reading IJ for the 4th time…yet). I’m finding it a much more difficult book to read and enjoy than IJ, though I’m only 142 pages in. (I do love the prose, which is gorgeous, even if I don’t have a clue what’s going on much of the time.)

To address your question above, I think IJ is about what it means to be happy, and how very, very fleeting and difficult genuine happiness really is. This is a (very, very mild) spoiler, but later on one character is observed to be “happy” by another character, and it’s the only place where a character is actually described that way (IIRC). That passage breaks my heart when I get to it, for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that it’s such a rare glimpse of happiness.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the attention paid to a tennis tournament is relevant because, for those tennis kids, the stakes are INCREDIBLY high. The tournament, and others like it, are the sole vector for their aspirations, and their own dreams of happiness. Of COURSE they are going to attend, with fiendish fervor, to ever little nuance. Hell, it might make all the difference between tennis success (which they believe will bring happiness) and failure.

This is something that has been bugging my about IJ as I go through it: the stakes just seem way too low.

What’s interesting is that the reasons you believe IJ to be an essentially small-stakes novel are the very reasons why I’ve come to see it as massively significant. Let me explain.

IJ is a novel about the dehumanizing effects of modern society. Think of Orin, whose only job is to kick a ball at designated points in a game. He sleeps with lots of women but consistently fails to connect with any of them on any level. Indeed, he seems determined to avoid connecting with them at any cost. And that’s his existence. Or think of Kate Gompert and Madame Psychosis, whose lives have become so ironically unbearable that they wish for death. etc. etc. etc.

The common thread running through all of the novel’s characters is their domination by addiction, drugs, depression, mass entertainment, and consumerism –- all of which aim at some form of escape from reality, from existence, from the Self. But they live in a world of immense psychic pain in place of love and friendship, of mind-numbing mass entertainment in place of intellectual depth; a world where materialism is the measure of all value. But in a world so infused with variegated forms of what we may call existential nihilism, who could blame them for wanting to escape?

They all lead basically lonely lives in one way or another, and they live those lives within the very kind of society that is now emerging in most of the modern West. Despite the fact that technology should be bring people closer together, people today are arguably more isolated than ever.

Consider Facebook. It is essentially a place for people to go write about how great their lives are in an attempt to convince not just others, but themselves, of their own importance and value, even while deep down they know that their lives are trivial and insignificant. Facebook illustrates in our time what videophones illustrate in Hal’s: that new technologies (for example) have offered greater opportunities for people to distance themselves from themselves and others, to pretend to be people they know they’re not but desperately wish they were.

This, then, is what IJ is ultimately about: that despite the greater potential for connecting with each other we’ve actually become more disconnected. It is a novel about mass alienation in the modern world; it is about growing ever more distant from each other, from ourselves, from our very humanity.

Small stakes? In my humble opinion, nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – could possibly be more important.

“Facebook illustrates in our time what videophones illustrate in Hal’s: that new technologies (for example) have offered greater opportunities for people to distance themselves from themselves and others, to pretend to be people they know they’re not but desperately wish they were.”

hey! thats not why i use facebook! heh, ahem. hold on a second while i see if i have any new photo comments…

anyhow, going along with the “small stakes” line of thinking… todeswalzer says that the stakes in IJ aren’t small at all and that, actually, this alienation/loneliness that everyone is being driven to is more important than what was at stake in generations past (ww2 and all that). hmmm, i like that. i also wonder if it’s the lack of “big stakes” that is the force behind these addictions (drugs, technology, vanity, etc). a lack of focus or motivation. i’m reminded of fight club (at least the movie, i can’t remember if it’s in the book) when brad pitt and edward norton are talking; imdb has the scene going like this:

Tyler Durden: My dad never went to college, so it was real important that I go.
Narrator: Sounds familiar.
Tyler Durden: So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say “Dad, now what?” He says, “Get a job.”
Narrator: Same here.
Tyler Durden: Now I’m 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, “Now what?” He says, “I don’t know, get married.”
Narrator: I can’t get married, I’m a 30 year old boy.
Tyler Durden: We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

there’s more to it than just what imdb had, but i think durden is saying what i was thinking. sorry thats not very clear, i just finished watching a bob hope special. anyone with more clarity want to think about the similarities between fight club and IJ’s use of support groups? there’s gotta be a deeper thing happening…

I love what you’ve said Todeswalzer, which I think is right on. And I often think of DFW/IJ when using Facebook. The weirdness of it. The sense that I’m connecting with people (friends, even) when of course, I’m not at all. I’m in front of a computer and so is everyone else. There is this illusion of connection without all of the complication/contraction/negation that comes with a real-live actual relationship.

I agree that the stakes are huge, as you say. About loneliness, alienation–about how absolutely terrifying it is to face one’s own alienation. How most of us would rather not face it (Avril says this later, at one point, speaking to Hal). There was this Saul Bellow line: The unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life makes you want to kill yourself.”

I think the Fight Club thing–the whole 12 step thing has to do too with a larger need among our generation (I say that loosely since I too was born in the, uh, early seventies) for a sense of community, a search for meaning. 12 step groups are a kind of secular church for all of us wayward nonbelievers. And they provide structure, too, which helps a great deal. I never read Fight Club though I saw the movie–my students always bring it up though, in ref to any madness/mental illness discussion.

Anyway. Thanks much.

(And one last query: rereading the videophony section gets me thinking about skype, which a lot of people–particularly expats I know–use and with a web camera. So even though I have no interest in the video aspect, I think IJ may be off in this regard. In the popularity then decline of it.)

Facebook illustrates in our time what videophones illustrate in Hal’s: that new technologies (for example) have offered greater opportunities for people to distance themselves from themselves and others, to pretend to be people they know they’re not but desperately wish they were.

I think that’s a pretty mainstream critique of Facebook/MySpace and other social networking sites, and one that seems too facile, to me. Sure, my evidence is anecdotal, but my experience on Facebook is that it allows me to see pictures of my friend’s babies across the country, allows me to congratulate a cousin abroad on his anniversary, etc. I don’t see Skype as a bad thing: I have relatives and friends in other countries who use it to see their parents, their siblings, and who otherwise would see their family in person only once a year.

It’s way too simplistic to knock the web in this way in an attempt to show that DFW was prophetic, when he wasn’t. Twitter was mocked as a stupid, pointless thing. And then people learned to what ends stupid pointless things could be harnessed during, say, an uprising in Iran.

And as I mentioned above, look at what we’re doing here on this site, or at the blog created in Prof. Fitzgerald’s class, or on Todewalzer’s own blog, and tell me with a straight face that the web is not enriching our lives, and ithat it instead is depleting or degrading them as the “Interlace” system of IJ does. That’s why I think IJ’s vision of the near future (of now) was off, and cartoonish.

It didn’t have to be realistic, and that wasn’t the point, and perhaps it shouldn’t be judged on prophetic accuracy. It’s a work of fiction. But if the goal is to argue that, no, IJ was prophetic (and why would we want to establish that?), well, that’s fine, but I can’t buy it.

(And I still — despite the explanations offered — have no idea what tennis has to do with the purported themes of the book. Yes, training is hard, and different kids have different styles of play and racquets, etc. So?)

“Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned over and over again.” p. 84

In my opinion, the internet both enriches AND detracts from our experience as social creatures. It’s contradictory, the way nearly everything is. But I would argue that our lives are going more to the general direction of alienation than in communion with one another.

Thank you for what you said about Facebook. Very articulate. You expressed something I’ve been grappling with but wasn’t sure if it was just me or not. -People blogging their lives in the style of a Travel & Leisure article.

Thanks, Kathleen, for this great account. I also looked at the student blog and was VERY impressed with the quality and insight. Few and far between among the University students I teach are those who can so effectively connect ideas across different texts. You were clearly the right person to be teaching DFW’s work, and your students are very lucky.

I’m on page 342. I’m discombobulated. I’m stymied. Data, data, data. His technical vocabulary, and what I’ll call his technical “twists,” are up in the stratosphere. I like certain parts very much. The last section I read (I won’t describe it because it’s past the spoiler line), I feel like he is pushing me away, but doesn’t know he is. Or does he?

The book deals with loneliness a great deal, of course. There is a loneliness that comes from reading something, a section, that you think or know everybody else loves but that you don’t always get reading pleasure from.

I’m turning anhedonic by the minute.

Poor Tony or Don Gately (although DFW has dealt with this latter character head-on in that respect), could never understand James O’s films or the stuff in the courses at E.T.A. I’ve never read a book where certain characters who were in the same room with each other would bore and confound the other characters to death. It’s interesting, to say the least.
(I supposed I missed some.)

“So maybe the stakes seem low to you, but I don’t think there is a consensus on that. For us ‘kids’ who did the bulk of our growing up after the fall of the Berlin wall, IJ seems more relevant, somehow.”
Arguments have been made, elsewhere, in and out of academia, that Infinite Jest is not part of the body of postmodern fiction, but is part of an as-yet-unnamed post post modern literary epoch. One in which the Modernist isolated subject and the unmoored sense of self is buffeted by both acknowledged cultural forces and the self-reflexive writing process itself. Wherein there is less irony and less mocking of fictional tropes and more earnest exploration of the person as product and as commodity. It seems to me that the point of Wallace’s novel is that the stakes are enormous and lie in the intense sadness and loneliness of Twenty-first Century life that sometimes manifests in escapism. That the pressures of life— whether being dropped off by your parents at a school where you are intended to cram your body and mind into a tiny niche, or being caught in carnivorous spirals of whatever TooMuch used to be Fun, or being forced by situations out of your control to switch allegiances—are overwhelming and that we, as a culture, don’t have many healthy ways of handling them. Pynchon and DeLillo et al deal with sociohistorical topics important to them as they wrote, and Wallac’s fiction does the same. We don’t have to debate whether the stakes are higher or lower and more than we debate high versus low culture. If an author makes you believe that the stakes are high for the characters, the literature has done its job. Just as the intentional fallacy will get us nowhere fast, so, too, will the reader response debate of what is more important. But make no mistake about minimizing the importance for the text of tennis and dreams for hundreds of kids, the vast majority of whom will fail at their goal of being in The Show: celebrity and sports are arguably just as poisonous entertainments as drugs as sex as The Entertainment, capital T capital E. And without addressing any spoilers, I will argue that several characters are more deeply developed than most of the ETA players by the end of the novel. We have annular rings of multiple threads of interwoven and totally isolated character and plot threads here, and comparing IJ to postmodern works now might just be premature and an apple-y orange-y situation.
Dr. K. I would have loved to take both the Wallace and The Big Novel courses. Your students are intensely lucky and I’m glad they made the experience challenging and gratifying for you. That’s a professor’s and a lit. devotee’s dream come true, no?

Wow. Wow. This seemed like such an amazing class. I did not go through the whole blog but I am so astounded by the few posts I read.

You must be an incredible teacher. How lucky for you, to have such an experience. How lucky for your students. It is a rare teacher who can do this with a course–make the students mourn its ending–probably no one can, every time. But many can’t ever do this.

I wonder if you would consider posting your syllabus…or maybe just your paper topics? I guess this is proprietary material of some kind. I just thought it would be so interesting to know more about the class and what the students actually did and how you structured things for them that they could have such an incredible experience. Some of the course materials would be cool to see.

I’m not an English professor so I’ll never teach your class…or use your syllabus in any way, shape or form…but maybe I’ll think about what was in your syllabus and assignments if I do go delve deeper into this work. It feels like I might have to. I read the book very critically–maybe too critically for some. But it also made me very curious. About the questions, you might say, although I would not call these philosophical questions so much as practical questions or actually, literary questions that are not about literature but about how this specific bit of literature interprets certain kinds of experiences. Also, I am more curious about what a novel is and what it does and how than I usually am when I read a novel.

At this point I would never say what the novel was about. Honestly, I think it is about too many things for me to even know what it’s about even though I just finished reading it and am going around a second time.

I thoroughly enjoyed your post. As a recent college graduate, I was happy to see someone bring in the intentional fallacy, which from my brief survey of the posts each week (I got the book 2 weeks into this whole thing, and have had to play a great deal of catch-up, which I finally completed last Friday) some readers are struggling with, myself included. I didn’t know Wallace at all, and IJ is my introduction to his work, but knowing the circumstances of his death, it’s impossible to not search for “clues.” I am indebted to my professors in this regard, who have taught me never to take this approach–“the author’s intentions are neither available, nor desirable” (I paraphrase, of course). The novel exists of its own accord, and we must treat it as such. I enjoyed your post and wish I could have attended your class (or that I had taken a course on Wallace at my own school).

At the same time I purchased IJ for this summer project, I also picked up Gravity’s Rainbow. Any chance you can help me pick that apart in late September? 😛

Anyway.

My experience with IJ so far, as a first time reader of Wallace, much less this hulking novel:
It’s dizzying, and I love it. Having read novels like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which was exciting at first, I was also secretly beginning to wonder if books aren’t becoming overly fixated on pop culture references and an “original” voice or narrative style, at the expense of language. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Wao, but I think that sort of slick voice has its place, and I fear the literary scene will be filled with people trying to imitate Diaz’s voice instead of write a great story. Hence my terrified excitement when Wallace used words I’d never heard of before; it’s been years since a book made me go to the dictionary and really work while I’m reading!

Beyond that, I am fascinated by the last couple sections here. Some people have discussed Hal’s treatment of finding Jim headless and, um, well done; a few suspect he’s kind of a jerk. What I noticed was the way in which all of this plays out: Hal takes us through his grief, which at times to me felt as though it was simply being narrated, right down to Hal’s outraged confession—at which point I stepped back and realized it was all being relayed in a story.

Yeah, perhaps Hal is messing around with the grief process; maybe he is being a jerk. The conversation, though, reminds us that we are disconnected from the real emotion Hal felt at that time, and similarly, from Wallace’s intentions. Even if he could tell us a story about what he meant, he would be able to alter it on the fly, rendering it unreliable and undesirable. I thought the whole conversation was brilliantly written, and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of disconnect at work that you wouldn’t even notice unless you were looking for it.

On that subject, I’ve seen the (antiquated?) use of “twitter” mentioned, and the ways in which services like Facebook seem to prove Wallace’s theories about society, but no one (that I’ve seen, forgive me if I’m repeating the obvious) has mentioned the easier parallel, that of the videophone and Skype. I recently read a great feature from the NY Times on this very feeling of disconnect at the hands of technology that’s supposed to bring us closer.

Baudrillard’s “Ecstasy of Communication” comes to mind, in terms of obscenity arising from these new technologies that supposedly forge deep connections. How far can we go down this path and still believe that we’re really connecting, when we’re just putting more and more layers or polybutylene masks or blue- and greenscreens between ourselves to avoid more exposure? We continue to expose ourselves with these new technologies, courting obscenity as Baudrillard defines it, and we continue to throw up distractions and more disguises to avoid falling into obscenity. Wallace was a genius in seeing all this coming, if you ask me. It’s no wonder Skype hasn’t taken off the way other instant messengers have, and why it had to be bought up by a company unconcerned that it wasn’t necessarily turning a profit (in this case, eBay).

But I digress. Madame Psychosis’ attempted suicide scene was also haunting and kept me reading even as the clock approached and passed 1, 2, and 3 a.m. (I was determined to catch up this week!). That she describes her overdose as Too Much Fun is obviously a poke at that ages-old “You can never have too much fun.” It also confirms it; she’ll OD and die before she has Too Much Fun. In much the same way I think the focus on communication (videophones) and the elusive Entertainment will also erode people’s connections with one another and society, respectively (a nation of sloths sitting glassy-eyed and soiled in front of a giant screen, just like the medical attache? hmmm…I think we’re there already). I wanted to take this further, but my train of thought has just been interrupted by iChat—ah, the Ecstasy of Communication…I’ll have to close that next time I post.

All in all, I’m really enjoying the challenge this novel poses, and I’m glad that you all have organized here to discuss it; I never would have stuck with this otherwise. My one hope is that we’ll not have any more discussions over the casting of the film…I’ll admit I thought about it too, but Meryl Streep as Madame P.? She’s one of my favorite characters so far! And she is not that old! (No offense to Meryl, a phenominally talented actress.)

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.
And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
And We said:
Look at that fucker Dance.”

Apologies. For those not familiar with Baudrillard’s essay, the (cursory) summary of the idea is that as things become more and more transparent, “spectacle” ceases to exist, and obscenity arises. Vis-a-vis Skype, this means that being able to see the other person and his/her immediate surroundings leaves no mystery or space to say, futz with your nails, as I believe was Wallace’s example in his history of videophones. The citizens in the novel have exposed themselves in full via video, and it’s uncomfortable enough to drive them back to audio-only communication. Thus, the people in Infinite Jest—like the woman who wrote the NY TImes feature—fear living in “the ecstasy of communication,” where nothing is hidden.

I’ve also been thinking of Skype–my in-laws like to use it to talk to my two year old. I understand the impulse, but I feel insanely uncomfortable fitting myself in the screen there, and having a conversation. The pressure! And then all of the things IJ mentions w/r/t videophony repulsion. And then, if I say, pretend to be doing something else (dishes, say), it’s even more awkward. Somehow it feels more invasive than the phone. And I’ve never been a big phone person. But I don’t know, I think skype is relatively popular, isn’t it? Even if I hate it, I know a lot of people who don’t. And I suppose if I were separated from say, my husband, for months at a time, I would appreciate it.

One thing that does occur to me though, is that lots of people had similar reactions to the telephone (Avital Ronell, bell hooks)–valid reactions to the illusion of the disembodied voice as allowing for real communication. But then, the telephone didn’t go anywhere. And I doubt that facebook/skype etc will either.

Repat: I wasn’t suggesting that Skype would go away, nor Facebook. I am in fact signed up for both, though I only used Skype while studying abroad (when you’re half a world away from your parents, the invasion of privacy suddenly becomes less of an issue). And you may be right, the next generation of people who grow up with this kind of technology may become less bothered by the invasion of privacy we perceive now; there are certainly plenty of users worldwide. In fact, my Japanese professor used the voice chat aspect of Skype to make us speak to people from Japan for free, and one of my Skype partners had a webcam set up as well. As Brock Vond says below, Wallace isn’t 100% accurate, but I think we’re on the cusp of whether or not we’ll see people fully embrace it. At least, I have yet to see the sale of any masks for the Skype-phobic. 🙂

Wow. Thanks for that post. I can only imagine the reading burden on the students of the Big Novels course! I’ve tried several times to read Gravity’s Rainbow and failed to get more than about 1/3 of the way through.

Good discussion here also. FWIW, it’s clear that DFW’s take on the near future turned out to be less than 100% accurate; in particular, he “failed” to predict the way the internet would turn out. (And he was wrong about the Great Convexity and sponsorship of names of years too – amateur!) But so what: maybe that was intentional; maybe the idea was to provide some distance from the world as it was then and as it seemed likely, at that time, to turn out.

I’ll have to wait and see how the hyper-real descriptions of the tennis tournament tie in with the rest of the book. I’ve read IJ before but I can’t remember all the details. My guess though is that, plot-wise, they don’t. It’s more a question of getting into the characters’ subjective experience (which I think is getting to one of the themes of the book). More generally, DFW is using tennis – clearly a subject on which he is an expert – as a metaphor to draw out some themes about life more generally. For instance, the passage (I think it is Schtitt talking to Mario but I don’t have the book in front of me to check) about boundaries and, ultimately, the player’s opponent being himself, is true about tennis but also about human experience in the broader sense. And DFW makes this point in a way that takes your breath away.

BTW my favourite character is Mario. He seems (so far anyway) to be the only main character that isn’t in some way fucked up, or on the way to being fucked up, mentally. Maybe there’s a little deliberate irony there as, physically, he is severely disabled and living among athletes.

[…] makes it an unlikely candidate to be taught widely in undergraduate classrooms (although obviously it can be done). Wallace’s persistent, casual use of brand names and pop-culture references74 would make […]